With the widespread deployment of the global communications network referred to as the Internet, the capability of providing electronic service (e-service) has become important to even well-established traditional business entities. An “e-service” is an on-line service that markets goods or services, solves problems, or completes tasks. E-services are accessible on the Internet by entering a particular Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into a navigation program.
Operators of e-services are often interested in inducing visitors of a website to act in a certain manner. For example, an operator (i.e., e-marketer) may be interested in the sale of goods or services to visitors or may merely request that visitors register by providing selected information. When a visitor acts in the desired manner, the event may be considered (and will be defined herein) as a “conversion.” The ratio of visitors who are converted to the overall number of visitors is referred to as a “conversion rate.” Presently, conversion rates at Internet websites are relatively low, typically in the range of two percent to four percent.
For various reasons, managers of websites are interested in accurate measures of conversion rates. For example, a change in a conversion rate may be used as a measure of the effectiveness of a promotion. Promotional offers are often presented to visitors in order to induce the visitors to interact with the website in a desired manner, e.g., register or purchase a product. Promotional offers include providing a discount on the price of the product being sold, providing free shipping and handling of the product, and/or providing a cost-free item. The typical goal of a promotion campaign plan is to increase the conversion rate in a cost-efficient manner.
There are a number of considerations in determining estimations of conversion rate or other estimations of anticipated behavior by visitors to a network accessible site. On some occasions, there is available pre-testing information regarding the conversion rate of a website. There may be a relatively low or relatively high level of confidence in the accuracy of such information. Thus, one consideration is whether to incorporate the pre-testing information into the process of determining conversion rate. A second consideration is the selection of an approach for updating estimations. Yet another consideration involves selecting the sample size in testing visitors. Given the fact that each additional visitor that is tested causes a marketer to incur an additional cost and a potential loss in market opportunity, an important issue is determining how large the sample size needs to be in order to achieve a target level of confidence. A fourth consideration regards the methodology for sampling visitors for the testing.
What is needed is a method and system which address these considerations in the estimations of anticipated visitor behavior.